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Microsoft Talks New Azure Datacenters, Solar Power: A Closer Look at Their Innovative Solutions and



Having signed a 20-year agreement with local solar energy system developer, owner, and operator Sunseap Group, the 60 megawatt-peak solar portfolio will span hundreds of rooftops across Singapore, and generate power for datacentre use.


While still a long way from commercial reality, green hydrogen is rapidly catching on among policymakers and major energy companies as a potential pathway to decarbonization of the electricity sector. Last week NextEra Energy, the largest U.S. generator of wind and solar power, revealed plans to build its first green hydrogen facility in Florida, to be fueled by solar power.




Microsoft Talks New Azure Datacenters, Solar Power




Recently, Microsoft committed to making its company carbon net zero by the year 2030. Part of this is working to make all their data centers fueled 100% by renewable energy by 2025. To reach this goal, Microsoft has lined up deals with solar and wind power companies around the world.


Tech firms like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have been leaning on renewable energy to tamp down on carbon emissions from data centers. With wind and solar, though, the data center still needs some kind of other source of power to fill in the gaps when output is low, or when an outage hits.


For companies seeking to burnish their sustainability cred, renewable hydrogen ices the cake. The idea is to produce hydrogen fuel using wind or solar power to run an electrolyzer system that splits hydrogen from water, store it on site, and deploy it to generate electricity in a fuel cell (other green hydrogen sources are emerging, but water appears to be the frontrunner for now).


In North Carolina, for example, Google leaned hard on Duke Energy Corp. to allow it, along with other big power customers, to buy the output of a big solar farm and use it to offset the power needs of its data center. In Virginia, Microsoft brokered a three-way deal between Dominion Virginia Power and the state government that for the first time allowed Microsoft to claim the output from a 20 MW solar plant.


Over the years, Microsoft has done a few tweaks and tunings with the Generation 4 datacenters, including getting rid of large-scale uninterriptible power supplies and putting small batteries inside servers instead. After realizing what a hassle it was to have a building with walls and a roof and that it took too long to get the ITPAC pods into the facility, Microsoft went all the way and got rid of the building. With one Generation 4 facility that was built in Quincy, the pods stand in the open air and the network and power are buried in the concrete pad they sit upon. And with a Generation 4 facility in Boydton, Virginia, Microsoft deployed adiabatic cooling, where air is blown over screens soaked with water in the walls of the datacenter to create cool air through evaporation of the water rather than using simple outside air cooling alone. (Facebook uses variations of this adiabatic cooling technology in its Forrest City, North Carolina facility.)


About two years later, Microsoft Research took the learnings from the original Natick and submerged 14 racks of servers instead of just one in a single pod off the coast of Scotland. That is a significant region not for its population density, but it is where a lot of renewable energy sources such as solar, offshore wind, and tidal/ wave power are deployed. Here is the video for the second generation undersea data center.


Google recently announced that it has entered into a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Engie, a French-based utility company, to acquire 12-year 100 MW of renewable energy from an offshore wind farm in Scotland. According to Matt Brittin, Head of Google EMEA, the UK, and Europe are increasingly concerned about climate change and energy resources. In this context, Google also has this common concern and plans to be 90 percent carbon neutral in Europe by 2025. Google previously made a deal with SoftBank/SB Energy to buy 900 MW of solar power for its data center in Texas.


For the last year, the tech world has buzzed with talk of the next big thing: cloud computing. Hailed as a breakthrough that will allow companies to compute without much hardware, the technology has pushed companies such as Microsoft, Amazon.com and Google to stake their claim. googletag.cmd.push(function() googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2'); ); As U.S. companies start exploring doing some of this computing this year, a school system on the other side of the globe has already leapt into the cloud. Ethiopia is rolling out 250,000 laptops to its schoolteachers nationwide, all running on Microsoft's cloud platform, called Azure.The laptops will allow teachers to download curriculum, keep track of academic records and securely transfer student data throughout the education system, without having to build a support system of hardware and software to connect them."They're going to be able to leapfrog ahead of most companies in the U.S.," said Danny Kim, chief technology officer of FullArmor, a Boston company working on the software deployment in the Ethiopian project. "There's no way we could have built up a new data center" in Ethiopia, Kim said, given the local technology environment. Rolling blackouts and slow response times in the Internet backbone would have made it difficult to develop a data network from the ground up.A data center -- the central element of cloud computing -- would have taken months to build and required downtime to expand as each new batch of teachers joined the network.By building in the Microsoft cloud, using data centers around the world that the company runs, Kim said FullArmor, working with partner SQLSoft, launched the project in weeks and can scale quickly from a pilot to tens of thousands of laptops by the end of the year."It extends reach of technology into the community that can take huge benefit from these services and yet may have not had access to it in the short term because of infrastructure requirements," said Doug Hauger, general manager of Windows Azure at Microsoft.What's happening in Ethiopia captures the possibilities of the cloud, he said -- "the agility, decreasing time to market, keeping it out of your own data center and allowing you to reach a broad audience regardless of where they are in the world."Microsoft says cloud computing has the potential to drastically reduce time and cost of developing applications accessible to massive numbers of users. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle []).push(); Many compare it to the rise of the electrical utility. Before utilities came to dominate the generation and distribution of electricity, businesses had to generate their own power, much the way companies now build their own networks by building data centers.The establishment of electrical-utility companies freed businesses from generating their own electricity. By building massive data centers in towns such as Quincy, Grant County, Microsoft hopes to provide computing as a utility for businesses.And just as the rise of electrical utilities set off an explosion of assembly-line manufacturing, the cloud could seed a new wave of computing at a scale and speed that would be impossible now, advocates say.The question is whether corporations will trust their core applications to Microsoft -- or Google, Salesforce.com, Amazon.com and other data-center providers.For instance, would a bank feel secure having its entire repository of financial data hosted on a third party's equipment?A Seattle data center caught fire over the Fourth of July and shut down the businesses of several Internet companies, including a Microsoft search engine, Bing Travel.While Microsoft did not run that data center, the incident highlighted physical risks in an online world.Education in Ethiopia has undergone dramatic changes over the past 20 years.Decades of civil unrest eroded the school system, and when the current government came to power in the early 1990s, primary-school enrollment was about 30 percent of school-age children.It has risen to more than 80 percent, according to some estimates."They're really focused on broad access, but the quality is still very lacking," said David Makonnen, executive director of the International Leadership Institute Academy of Ethiopia, a Seattle nonprofit raising money to build an academy there.Students don't have enough textbooks, the student-teacher ratio is high, and teachers are poorly paid, he said.A system of keeping track of academic performance, for instance, would allow his academy to spot talented students throughout the country, he said.FullArmor's Kim estimates building a network for thousands of teachers would have cost hundreds of dollars per teacher, compared with a few dollars per month via the cloud.Through the cloud, FullArmor can push software updates, clean out viruses and send curriculum software to each laptop.To deter theft, the teacher's laptops are tracked by location, and if they leave an area the laptop's hard drive can be wiped clean remotely.Makonnen said that although technology alone cannot improve the quality of education, the laptop program has potential."Any effort that includes education through technology capability is something we would support if it improves access and improves technology capability of teachers who today are constrained by resources," he said.___(c) 2009, The Seattle Times.Visit The Seattle Times Extra on the World Wide Web at www.seattletimes.comDistributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. Citation:Microsoft cloud computing gets down to earth (2009, July 16)retrieved 9 February 2023from -07-microsoft-cloud-earth.html This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only. Explore further


In December 2021, Amazon announced 18 new wind and solar energy projects in the AWS regions US, Finland, Germany, Italy, and the UK, totalling 5.6 GW of new renewable energy capacity and a 40% increase from 2020. This, they claim, puts the company on track to power all its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025 (five years earlier than the initial target). It will be exciting to follow these developments and see AWS taking steps towards real decarbonisation. 2ff7e9595c


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